BODY-WRITING AND INSURGENCY:

DEOLINDA RODRIGUES BETWEEN MEMORY, STRUGGLE, AND THE DENUNCIATION OF COLONIAL AESTHETICS

Abstract

This article examines the writings of Deolinda Rodrigues, a militant of the MPLA, based on the works Cartas de Langidila e outros documentos (2003a) and Diário de um exílio sem regresso (2003b), situating them as literary and political expressions of resistance to Portuguese colonialism and patriarchal domination. Rodrigues’s writing interweaves intimate and collective dimensions, revealing processes of subjectivation that challenge Western paradigms of representation of African women. In contexts marked by exile and armed conflict, her work mobilizes affect and critique as strategies of insurgency. By blurring the boundaries between literature and testimony, the personal and the political, the author reinscribes Black women as agents of Angolan history. Grounded in reflections by Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí (1997), bell hooks (2019), and Achille Mbembe (2014), the study demonstrates how Deolinda's body-writing constitutes a space of memory and rupture, inscribing a Black female subjectivity that resists erasure and reclaims lived experience as material for aesthetic elaboration and political intervention. Her work thus contributes to the decolonization of knowledge and the recognition of literature produced by African women.